Pocket Rigger

Pocket Rigger began as a conversation in 2006 with my brother Steve Shaw — a career rigger and the founder of Levitation Productions Inc. Steve had an idea: a load monitoring system built around durable shackle load cells, tracking rigging loads in real time over Bluetooth. To make that useful on site, riggers needed a fast way to work out leg tensions and lengths on the spot — not back at a desk with a calculator and a notepad.

That calculator became the first version of Pocket Rigger, running on Windows Mobile — PDAs and the Windows Mobile phones of the era. Steve always wanted it on iOS too, but the development tools and Bluetooth support of the time made that a much harder problem than it is today.

Pocket Rigger doesn't talk to those load cells — that's a separate, more specialized piece of hardware — but the tension-and-length calculator that started it all is still exactly what the app is for: fast, accurate math for two- and three-leg bridle hangs. With .NET MAUI, it finally made it to iOS as well as Android. Along the way it's grown a bit past the original idea too — attach a PDF show plot to a Show and share it with the rest of your crew.

Drop Zone started as a breakfast tradition with my son Brad. When he was in elementary school, we used to play Connect 4 most mornings before school — and Brad, being a kid, played to win by any means necessary. Humming an annoyingly catchy tune to throw me off, quietly nudging a piece with his finger when he thought I wasn't looking, resetting the board entirely if a game wasn't going his way — nothing was off-limits.

Drop Zone: Beat Brad is a tribute to those mornings. The core game is the Connect Four we actually played; Chaos Mode — where full columns drop and full rows vanish mid-game — is my way of turning "Brad rearranging the board the second I looked away" into an actual game mechanic. Every time I load it up, it brings back a good memory.

Jackpot: Shut the Box comes from a couple of years spent living and working in Malaysia, from 2009 to 2010. Phuket, Thailand became a favorite quick getaway, and one of the reasons was a game I kept finding at the beachside tiki bars there — locals just called it Jackpot. I spent more evenings than I can count playing it on the beach with a cold Singha in hand, watching the sun go down over the water. That sunset is the actual background photo in the app.

Phuket had a lot to love beyond the game — deep-sea fishing for tuna and blue marlin (I landed one marlin, a genuine bucket-list catch), the huge Big Buddha that was still under construction at the top of the mountain at the time, riding an elephant, and a zoo where you could sit right next to — and pet — a full-grown tiger. Jackpot: Shut the Box is a small piece of that time and place, brought back.